sonar and sound card

[mboud]

i'm looking into putting together a new system from scratch and am wondering what would be the best sound card/audio interface to use with sonar xl. i have not bought any pieces of equipment yet. my biggest concerns are latency, especially during playback/record, and midi, since i will be doing nearly no audio recording. sonar claims some pretty impressive numbers on concerning latency if you have a sound card with wdm drivers, but i would like to hear about some real world experiences with it, not a salesman's. also, i'm really new to this stuff, so if my terminology is not all correct, please forgive me. i have never actually used any software of this type for more than a few minutes, but have heard that cakewalk is really good with midi. i want to make my own electronic music, with main interest in techno, trance and house.
thanks in advance for your input.

mboud

 

[crosstudio]

FYI sonar monitoring

oops i put the wrong message in here...

if all you're doing is midi, then you shouldn't give a care about latency. eventually though, you're going to want to mix your midi into a stereo audio mix. that's where cakewalk/sonar will really come in handy.

eventually, you'll get to the point of wanting to record your individual midi tracks as audio, and perform some processing (reverb, delay, etc...). that's when cakewalk/sonar will really, really come in handy.

 

[schwa]

I own an aark card....

but if I was buying today for SONAR, I'd get a delta. They have a flavor with as many inputs as you'd like and their WDM drivers arer working well. The Delta 1010 seems to be what cake used to test all this stuff out.

There are a load of real world observations concerning different cards (WDM and non-WDM) in Cakewalk's SONAR newsgroup. You can find a link to it on their website.

 

[mboud]

thanks cross, schwa!

i ended up buying the delta 44. i'll probably be back on soon to ask more questions, but i'll definitely be back to post my thoughts on its performance.

this board rocks!